Mississippi’s Lott to Leave Senate Seat

Senator Trent Lott announced on Monday in Pascagoula, Miss., that he will retire from the Senate. Credit
Alex Brandon/Associated Press

PASCAGOULA, Miss., Nov. 26 — Senator Trent Lott’s announcement on Monday that he would resign in a few weeks added to the growing Republican exodus from Congress, but may have strengthened Mr. Lott’s post-Senate job prospects.

By retiring before the end of the year, Mr. Lott, the 66-year-old minority whip and Mississippi dealmaker who fell from power with a remark touching on segregation but then bounced back, avoids new rules forcing senators to wait two years before lobbying former colleagues.

Still, Mr. Lott insisted Monday that he was not ending his 35-year career in Congress because of the rules, pointing instead to “financial commitments” made before Hurricane Katrina, a desire to “do something else” and other reasons.

Mr. Lott made the surprise announcement in this Gulf Coast city where he grew up and where his father was a shipyard worker. He had been re-elected to a fourth term just last year, and Mississippi politicians had not expected his seat to be contested until 2012.

The governor said he would not be a candidate, and speculation in Mississippi political circles on Mr. Lott’s Republican successor immediately centered on Representative Roger Wicker of northeast Mississippi, along with Representative Charles W. Pickering Jr., a former Lott aide who plans to retire from the House. The potential Democratic challengers include former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove and former Attorney General Mike Moore.

Mr. Lott is the sixth Republican senator to announce his retirement, and one of the more practiced ones.

His party is the presumptive favorite to retain the seat next year in this deeply Republican state. But in next year’s elections, Republicans must now defend 23 Senate seats, and Democrats only 12. Seventeen Republicans and five Democrats are giving up their House seats.

James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Presidential and Congressional Studies at American University, said there was no question in his mind that Mr. Lott’s decision had been influenced by the new ethics and lobbying rules. Senators who retire this year have to wait only one year before lobbying their former colleagues, instead of the two years that go into effect in 2008.

“The new two-year cooling off period is encouraging people who have been around for a long time, especially in the minority, to leave,” Mr. Thurber said. “They know that the golden window of opportunity is immediate.”

Mr. Lott, responding to questions about why he was stepping down so soon after his 2006 re-election, said he had wanted to leave the Senate after his previous term expired, but “then Katrina intervened” and he ran again “because the people I loved so much were still struggling” with the storm’s aftermath.

Now, “we’ve gotten through Katrina, and I just felt like I needed to do something with my limited time in life.” He said he had no specific plans.

Senate Republicans quickly began maneuvering for a shuffling of their leadership. Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, currently the No. 3 Republican, announced that he would make a bid for Mr. Lott’s post as whip. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who lost the whip’s job to Mr. Lott by one vote last year, said he would support Mr. Kyl.

Mr. Lott announced the end of his career at a news conference much as he had conducted the bulk of it, with an accommodating affability that included ingratiating mentions even of ideological opponents like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York.

“This is not a negative thing. There’s no malice, no anger,” he said, smiling into the crowded meeting room of a motel here where he said he had held his first victory party 35 years ago.

Mr. Lott, the smooth Senate maneuverer with a penchant for compromise, was something of a throwback to a less-partisan era, and the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, praised him on Monday as “reaching across the aisle.”

Mr. Lott, who once held the same post as Mr. Reid, said, “You can get things done even in the minority, if you’re willing to work with the other party.” He rejected suggestions that his party’s diminished status had hastened his leaving.

He lost his home here to Hurricane Katrina, then struggled with his insurance company as thousands of others here did, something he said had spurred him on as an advocate for storm victims.

It was Mr. Lott’s instinct to ingratiate that led both to his most pronounced moment in the national spotlight and subsequent fall, and to his slow climb back. At a 100th birthday tribute to Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in 2002, Mr. Lott alluded favorably to Mr. Thurmond’s campaign for president as a segregationist Dixiecrat in 1948, saying the nation would have been better off had Mr. Thurmond been elected.

The apparently offhand remark provoked an outcry. President Bush rebuked him despite Mr. Lott’s public apologies, and the senator was forced to quit his post as Republican leader. The episode embittered Mr. Lott, leaving him with a momentary and uncharacteristic sharp edge. But by last year all had been forgiven and forgotten, and his colleagues elected him to the party’s No. 2 position in the Senate.

Many Mississippi residents, whites especially, were indignant at the treatment meted out to a power in the state’s politics for three decades, and many felt Mr. Lott had nothing to apologize for. Through it all, Mr. Lott insisted he was not defending segregation in his tribute to Mr. Thurmond, maintaining he had changed, like many other Southerners, from the days when he once had.

From early years as a vote-hustling high school leader, then cheerleader and conciliating fraternity president at the University of Mississippi during the 1962 crisis over integration, Mr. Lott has had a natural campaigner’s instinct for the tide of majority opinion in his often ornery state.

He began his political career working in the successful 1967 campaign for governor by Representative John Bell Williams, a Democrat, who ran one of the last openly racist campaigns for governor in the state. Mr. Lott became an aide to the longtime Democratic congressman from the Gulf Coast, William Colmer, an old-line segregationist, and Mr. Lott appears to have had no difficulty defending Mr. Colmer’s positions.

When Mr. Colmer retired in 1972, Mr. Lott ran for his seat as a Republican, and won. He quickly entered the national spotlight as a youthful last-ditch defender of President Richard M. Nixon.

For years Mr. Lott patiently toiled in the House, advancing to minority whip in the early 1980s, then to the Senate in 1988 and finally to Senate majority leader, before his quick fall in 2002.

“I’ve been on mountaintops,” Mr. Lott said Monday. “I’ve been down in the valley. I took a few licks. I made a few mistakes.”

Hastert’s Last Day

CHICAGO, Nov. 26 (AP) — Representative J. Dennis Hastert, the former House speaker who made a farewell speech to colleagues 11 day earlier, formally resigned Monday in a letter to Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois.

Adam Nossiter reported from Pascagoula, and David M. Herszenhorn from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Mississippi’s Lott to Leave Senate Seat Held Since ’88. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe